


On Hunting

by EnderBerlyn



Series: On Hunting [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Curtain Fic, Future Fic, Gen, Hurt Sam Winchester, M/M, Novel, POV Sam Winchester, non-explicit Wincest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-04
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-05-31 07:17:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 6,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6460969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EnderBerlyn/pseuds/EnderBerlyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the story of Sam and Dean, and their lives together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It's 2028. The world learned about the Supernatural when the Darkness overtook the planet before being defeated in 2016. Sam and Dean have celebrity status and aspiring hunters are popping up all over the world. Sam writes a book to help them along.
> 
> Canon until mid-season 11.
> 
> I read Stephen King's On Writing and couldn't help imagining what it would be like if Sam had written it. Then this happened.
> 
> Not my characters, not for profit, and mostly not even my ideas. Just my re-work of Stephen King's book in a Supernatural universe.
> 
> I'll do my best to post a new chapter every week.

My earliest memory is actually of pretending to be someone else – imagining that I was none other than the Incredible Hulk as portrayed by Lou Ferrigno. This was at my dad’s friend Bobby Singer’s place, an old salvage yard out in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. My brother remembers this day very clearly and insists that I was two and a half, certainly no more than three years old.

I had found part of a rusted engine block in a rarely used corner of the salvage yard and somehow managed to pick it up. I carried it slowly across the hard packed dirt of the yard, except in my mind my skin was glowing green and I was wearing little more than a pair of ripped up blue jeans as I carried a car over my head through a busy intersection. Taxis slammed on their brakes and pedestrians stopped to stare in disbelief. Their awestruck faces told the story: never had they seen such an incredibly strong child. “I can’t believe he’s only two,” one of them whispered in wonder.

Unknown to me, a family of wasps had built a small nest within the bowels of the engine block. One of them, likely enraged by the sudden relocation, flew out and stung me on the face just below my right eye. The pain was startling, like a blast of ice water over sunburnt skin. It was without a doubt the worst pain I had ever experienced in my short life, for a fraction of a second at least. When I dropped the rusted engine fragment on my foot, smashing all five of my toes, the wasp completely slipped my mind. I can’t recall being taken to the doctor and neither can Dean (Bobby, to whom the malicious engine part surely belonged, is almost eighteen years dead), but he still remembers the wasp, the smashed foot, and my earsplitting reaction. “You screamed like a little bitch, Sam!” he said. “I thought the neighbors were gonna call the cops.”


	2. Chapter 2

About a year after the wasp incident, my father, my brother and I were in Faribault, Minnesota. I don’t remember why. My father was still learning to hunt at this point. His journal in the early years is pretty hit and miss, more on account of age and years in storage than any fault of his own. Anyway, he could have been there on a job – probably was – but he could have just as easily been meeting a contact or building a weapons cache. Dean doesn’t remember, so I guess I’ll never know.

I do remember the endless stream of babysitters during our time in Faribault. I don’t remember if they left because Dean and I were a handful, my father scared them, or they found better paying work elsewhere; all I know is that there was a lot of them. The only one I remember with more than a vague impression is Sandy, or maybe she was Candi. She was sixteen, the size of a Mac truck, and had an infectious laugh. Sandy-Candi had a fantastic sense of humor, one that I was able to recognize even at the tender age of four, but it was a dangerous sense of humor – there seemed to be a hidden lightning bolt wrapped within each back-slapping, head-shaking, butt-jiggling burst of cheer. Whenever I see those nanny-cam videos of real-life babysitters winding up and slapping a child in the face, it’s my time with Sandy-Candi that I always think of.

Was she as tough on my brother Dean as she was on me? I have no idea. He’s not in any of these snapshots. Besides, at just shy of nine-years-old, he would have been in third grade; out of the house most of the day and less at risk from Hurricane Sandy-Candi’s treacherous winds. 

Sandy-Candi would be laughing on the phone, twirling the long cord around her fingers, and beckon me over. She’d wrap her arms around me, tickle me, get me cackling, and then, still laughing, knock me upside the head so hard I’d land on my ass. Then she’d tickle me with her bare, filthy toes until we were both laughing again.

Sandy-Candi had some fairly intense gastrointestinal issues, prone to farts that were just as likely to knock you out as her hand was. Sometimes when she was having a particularly gassy day, she would toss me on the ratty sofa, drop her elephantine butt on my face, and let one rip. “Bam!” she’d screech with glee. It was like being buried in a landfill alongside a family of wet, angry skunks. I remember the dark, the feeling of suffocating slowly, and I remember laughing like a lunatic. Because, while what was happening was terrifying, it was also kind of funny. In some ways, Sandy-Candi prepared me for a life of hunting. After a two-hundred-thirty-pound babysitter repeatedly farts on your face and yells Bam!, an uncooperative witness or a surly sheriff holds little terror.

I’m not sure what happened to all the other sitters that dotted my younger days, but Sandy-Candi was fired. It was because of the eggs. One morning Sandy-Candi made me a fried egg for breakfast. When I was finished, I asked her for another one. Sandy-Candi fried me another egg, then asked if I’d like a third. She had this dangerous glint in her eye that said, “Don’t you dare eat another one, Sammy.” So of course I asked for another one. And another. And so on. I stopped at eight, I’m fairly certain – eight is the number that’s very clearly embedded in my mind. I don’t know why I stopped at eight. Maybe we ran out of eggs. Maybe Sandy-Candi got a phone call. Maybe I finally tapped out. However it ended, it was probably good that it stopped at eight. Eight eggs are quite a lot for a four-year-old. 

I felt okay for a while, then I puked all over the floor. Sandy-Candi laughed, then knocked me upside the head and locked me in the closet. Bam. If she’d locked me in the bathroom instead of the closet, she probably would have been able to save her job, but for whatever reason she didn’t. As for me, I didn’t really mind the closet. Sure, it was dark, but it smelled like my dad’s leather jacket and there was a thin sliver of light coming under the door. 

I crawled into the back corner of the closet, snuggled up in Dad’s suits and dress shirts. I began to burp – loud, painful belches that burned like acid. I don’t remember being nauseated but I must have been because when I went to let loose another long, fiery belch, I yacked again instead. All over my dad’s dress shoes. That was the last I saw of Sandy-Candi. When my dad came home that evening, the babysitter was sleeping soundly in his bed and little Sammy was locked in the closet, fast asleep with partially-digested fried eggs drying in his hair.


	3. Chapter 3

Our stay in Faribault was both short and unsuccessful. We were evicted from our shabby fourth-floor apartment when a neighbor caught sight of my eight-year-old brother crawling around on the roof and called the cops. I’m not sure where my father was when this happened. I’m not sure where the sitter of the week was, either. I do remember that I was in the bathroom, standing with my bare feet on the radiator, watching to see if my brother would plummet from the roof or make it safely back through the bathroom window. He made it back. He is now forty-eight and lives with me in Kansas.


	4. Chapter 4

When I was five or six years old, I asked my father if he had ever seen anyone die. Yes, he said with vacant eyes; he had heard a boy die when he was younger, seen few men meet their maker in the war, and another when he came back to the states. He never mentioned my mother and, at this point in my life, I didn’t think to ask. I did, however, ask how you could hear a person die and he told me that the boy had drowned off the coast of Nantucket in the 1960s. He said the boy swam out past the rip, couldn’t fight his way back in, and started screaming for help. Several people tried to reach him, but no one could. In the end, they could only stand and wait, the teen who was to become my father among them, hoping for a rescue boat that would never arrive while the boy screamed until his strength gave out and he went under. His body washed up in Martha’s Vineyard, my father told me. I asked how old the boy was. Dad said he was twelve, then told Dean to read me a chapter out of James and the Giant Peach and tuck me into bed. On some later day he told me about the man he saw die when he came back from the war – a banker who jumped off the roof of a Best Western in Wichita and landed on a car. 

“He splattered,” my father said in his most authoritative tone. He paused, then added, “The shit that came out of him was green. I’ll never forget that.”  


That makes two of us, Dad.


	5. Chapter 5

Most of the nine months I should have spent in the first grade were passed in bed. It started with the measles – a perfectly boring case – and then got progressively worse. I suffered through round after round of what I mistakenly thought was called “striped throat”; I stayed in bed drinking the coldest water I could get my hands on and imagining my throat striped in alternating shades of sickly white and angry red (which probably wasn’t too far from the truth).

At some point my ears joined the fray, and one day my father shoved me in the back of his Impala and took me to a doctor far too important to come out to our ramshackle rental – an ear specialist. (For whatever reason I got it in my head that this type of doctor was called an otiologist.) I can’t say I really cared if he specialized in ears or assholes. I had a hundred and four temperature and every time I swallowed pain lit up my throat like lightning flashes during a Midwestern summer storm. 

The doctor peered into my ears, spending the bulk of his time (I think) focused on the right one. Then he laid me out on his exam table. “Lift up a minute, Sammy,” the nurse said and worked a large papery pad – maybe it was a diaper – under my head, and turned me so my cheek rested on it when I lay back down. I should have guessed that something fishy was going on. Hell, maybe I did.

There was a biting scent of alcohol. A clang as the ear doctor readied his instruments. The needle glinted in his hand – it looked as long as one of the pencils in my school bag – and I tensed. The doctor smiled widely and told the lie for which all doctors should be immediately imprisoned (sentence to be doubled when told to a child): “Relax, Sammy, this won’t hurt.”

I believed him.

He slid the needle into my ear and used it to puncture my eardrum. The pain was beyond anything I had ever felt before or since. A few things have come close, though: the day a dull, rusty blade was shoved into my back and severed my spinal cord or maybe the first month of recovery after being struck by a van in the summer of 2026. That pain was longer in duration but not as intense. The puncturing of my eardrum was pain beyond what anyone should ever experience. I screamed. There was a loud smacking sound – not unlike a kiss – inside my head and then hot fluid started streaming out of my ear as though I had started crying from the wrong hole. God knows I was crying enough out of the right ones by that time. I lifted my tear-streaked face and stared at the doctor and his nurse in disbelief. Then I looked at the absorbent material the nurse had spread out over the top half of the exam table. There was a large wet patch where my head used to be, laced with fine tendrils of yellow pus.

“All done,” the ear doctor said, clapping me on the shoulder. “You were very brave, Sammy. It’s over now.”

The following week my father shoved me into the backseat again, we drove back to the ear doctor’s, and I once again found myself curled up on my side with a diaper shoved under my head. The scent of alcohol filled the room once more – a smell that is now irrevocably linked, I suppose as it is with most people, to pain and suffering and fear – and with it, the ridiculously long needle made another appearance. Once again, I was promised it wouldn’t hurt, and once again I believed him. Maybe not completely, but enough to lie still and silent while the needle slipped into my ear.

He lied. It did hurt. Nearly as much as the first time, to be honest. The kissing in my head was quite a bit louder, too. “There now,” the nurse said when the doctor was finished with me and I lay there crying in a puddle of tears and watery pus. “It only hurt a little, and it’s not like you want to be deaf, do you? Anyway, it’s over now.”

I believed her for just shy of a week, and then I was back in the Impala. We headed back to the ear doctor’s. I recall my brother threatening my father with jumping out the window if Dad didn’t figure out some way to shut me up. Yet again I found myself on an exam table with a diaper under my head while my dad sat out in the waiting room with some lore book. Once more the distinctive scent of alcohol filled the room and the doctor turned to me with a smile, a foot-long needle, and a pain-free promise. 

Since the repeated eardrum-lancings of my youth, one of the most constant principles that govern my life is the old adage: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on both of us. I bucked and howled and fought and flailed. Every time the needle got anywhere near me, I slapped it away until the nurse finally fetched my father from the waiting room. Together, the two of them managed to pin me down enough for the doctor to shove his needle into my ear. Again. I shrieked so loud and so long that some days I can still hear it. I think that somewhere, in some deep canyon in my mind, that scream is still echoing.


	6. Chapter 6

In a grey winter month not too much later – it was probably January or February of 1990, if I’m remembering the chain of events correctly – Dad put me in the backseat again. This time it was a visit to the throat doctor instead of the ear doctor. Once more my father sat in the waiting room, once more I sat on the exam table, and once more the sharp scent of alcohol, a smell that still has the ability to double my heartrate even after all this time.

The only difference was the color of the wallpaper and that, this time, all that appeared was a throat swab instead of a pencil-length needle. It burned, left a horrible taste in my mouth, but it was a day at the waterpark compared to the ear doctor’s needle. The throat doctor fastened a peculiar gadget to his head with a long strap. It had a mirror in the center, and a blinding light that shone from the middle like a heavenly third eye. He stared down my throat for a long time, telling me to open wider and wider still until my jaws clicked, but he didn’t stick a single needle into me and so I loved him. Sometime later I was allowed to shut my mouth and the nurse fetched my father.

“It’s his tonsils,” the doctor said. “They look like a honey badger got to them. We’ll need to remove them.”

A while after that, I remember being pushed on a gurney under glaring overhead lights. A man in a blue mask towered over me. He was looming over my head as I lay on the table (1989 and 1990 were apparently my years for lying on tables), and he looked upside down to me.

“Samuel,” he said. “Can you hear me?”

I said I could.

“Take a deep breath,” he said. “You can have all the ice cream you like, just as soon as you wake up.”

He placed some sort of contraption over my mouth and nose. I took a deep breath like he had instructed, and don’t remember anything else. When I woke up I was indeed allowed as much ice cream as I wanted, which was complete bullshit because I didn’t want any. Dean did, though. The nurse kept bringing it and he kept right on eating it. I would have reminded him about what happened with the eggs, but my throat hurt too much to bother. It was swollen an angry, but it was better than the old needle-in-the-ear trick. Oh yes. Absolutely anything was better than the old needle-in-the-ear trick. Take my tonsils, stab me in the spine if you have to, but God save me from the otiologist.


	7. Chapter 7

                That year my brother Dean entered the fifth grade and I stopped going to school altogether. My father must have foraged my records when we skipped town though, because I started back up in the fall like I’d never missed a day.

                Most of that year was spent either in bed or trapped within the confines of one shabby motel or rundown apartment after another. I read my way through every book I could get my feverish little hands on, progressed from Dean’s comic books to Tom Swift and Huck Finn, then moved on to my father’s lore books. At some point, I began writing my own notes like I’d seen my father do. Or rather, I began to copy down the foreign words exactly as they appeared in _Rituale Romanum_ in a ratty spiral notebook, sometimes adding my own made up words where they seemed appropriate. “ _Exorcizamus te, ominous immundus spiritus, undium marchi_ ,” I might write. It was another year or two before I realized that _ominous_ and _omnis_ were two entirely different words. During the same timeframe I remember believing that _beaches_ were _breeches_ and that a bitch was an exceptionally tall woman. A son of a bitch was likely to be on the basketball team. When you’re six, most of your cards are still in the deck.

                Eventually I showed one of these copycat hybrids to my father. It was something from some dusty British tome on the stalking tactics of werewolves. He was elated. I don’t think he was ever as proud of me as he was at that moment, either before or after. I remember his crooked smile and slightly stunned expression, as if he couldn’t believe a child of his could be so brilliant. I had never seen that look on his face before – at least not because of anything I had done – and I loved it.

                He asked me if I had written it myself, and I was forced to admit I had copied the majority of it out of one of his books. It didn’t seem to faze him, and that lifted me up into the stratosphere. I let him flip through the rest of my notebook, the cover long since fallen off, and the look of wonder never left his face. Not long after that, he handed me my very first journal and shiny new beginner Latin workbooks began peeking out from between his dusty lore books. Sanskrit primers started popping out from under the Impala’s backseat. I couldn’t get enough.


	8. Chapter 8

I remember the immense feeling of _possibility_ when I looked at the books spread out before me, as if I had entered into a sprawling building filled with hall after hall of closed doors and given leave to open any I liked. There were more doors than any one person could open in a lifetime, I thought (and still do).

I eventually translated a few pages from a yellowed bundle I found at the bottom of one of my father’s boxes of books. The paper was timeworn and nearly translucent. The handwriting was impeccable. I absolutely _had_ to know what it said. When I was finished, I had produced four laboriously printed pages on the preferred personality types for demonic habitation. I gave it to my father, who sat down on the couch and read it all at once. I could tell he liked it, but I couldn’t figure out if it was because he liked me and wanted me to feel good or because it really _was_ good.

“You didn’t copy this one?” he asked when he had finished reading. I told him I hadn’t. He said it was good enough to go in the _Compendium of Demonology and Magic_. Nothing anyone has said to me since has made me feel any happier than I did at that moment. I did four more translations from the bundle in my father’s box. Three from Latin and one from Sanskrit. He sent them to some other hunters, who pitied him a little, I think. _They_ were all on their own after all; they had no one but themselves to look out for. It was true that Rufus didn’t have much of a sense of humor and was stubborn about working on the Sabbath, it was true that Bobby drank quite a bit and had strange ideas about Tori Spelling, but they were _independent_. John, on the other hand, had been left holding the baby while Mary had burned on the ceiling. He wanted them to see that the baby was talented, at least.

Five little translations. That was the first thing I ever contributed to this life.


	9. Chapter 9

We moved to Paoli, Indiana. By then, I was in the middle of second grade and head over heels for the girl next door. She never even looked at me in the light of day, but at night, as I lay curled up against my brother and drifted toward sleep, we ran away from the cruel world of reality again and again. My new teacher was Mrs. Hoyer, a sweet old lady with greying beehive hair and a mighty lisp. “Whenever we’re talking I always want to shove a kazoo in Mrs. Hoyer’s mouth and see if she whistles,” my dad said.

Our new second-floor apartment was on West Thorton Street. A few blocks down the hill, not far from Porky’s BBQ and behind Huck’s Convenient Food Store, was a tangled wilderness area with a massive junkyard on the far side and an abandoned logging road running through the middle. This is one of the places I keep returning to in my dreams; I imagine it will turn up in Dean’s and my Heaven again and again, under a variety of names. The kids in town call it the Barrens; we called it the jungle. Dean and I started exploring it not too long after we had moved into our new (old) apartment. It was midsummer. It was sweltering. It was great. We were deep into the verdant depths of this new wonderland when I was suddenly overcome by the urgent need to take a dump.

“Dean,” I said. “We have to go! I gotta push!” (This was the word that somehow stuck around from our toilet training days.)

Dean didn’t give a fuck about my bowels. “Go do it in the woods,” he said. It would have taken us a good half an hour to get home. He had no absolutely no intention of returning to our empty, stuffy apartment any sooner than he absolutely had to just because his little brother had to take a crap.

“I can’t!” I said, scandalized by the idea. “I won’t be able to wipe!”

“Of course you will,” Dean said. “Just use some leaves. That’s how the cowboys and Indians did it.”

By the time we finished arguing it was probably too late to get me home anyway; I have the impression that I acquiesced because I was simply out of options. I must admit, though, that the idea of shitting like a cowboy had me intrigued. I did my business, pretending all the while that I was the Sundance Kid, squatting in the trees with my gun drawn lest I be caught off guard at such a personal moment. I cleaned up as my big brother had instructed, grabbing a big handful of shiny green leaves and carefully wiping my ass. They turned out to be poison ivy.

Not even 48 hours later I was shiny red from the back of my knees up to the nape of my neck. My penis was spared, but my testicles turned into apples. My ass itched all the way up to my lungs, or so it seemed. Worse than everything else was the hand I had wiped with. It looked like one of those cartoons where the antagonist gets hit with a hammer and his thumb swells up like a balloon, but everywhere. Massive blisters formed where my fingers rubbed together and when they burst, they left deep pockets of angry pink flesh. For six weeks I sat in room-temperature baths filled with corn starch, feeling wretched and mortified, eavesdropping through the open door while my father and brother laughed as they listened to Bob Seger and cleaned the guns.


	10. Chapter 10

Dean was a great brother, but far too smart for his own good. His brains were always getting him in trouble, and he learned at some point (probably after I had wiped my ass with poison ivy) that it was usually possible to get Brother Sammy to join him whenever trouble was on the horizon. Dean never asked me to take _all_ the blame for his often brilliant fuck-ups – he was neither a sneak nor a coward, even then – but I was occasionally asked to share it. Which was, I presume, the reason Dad tanned _both_ our hides when Dean damned up the stream running through the jungle and flooded most of lower West Thorton Street.

Sharing the blame was also the primary reason we both ran the risk of getting killed while implementing his school science project. This was probably in 1994, after we had moved to Ogallala, Nebraska. I was at Prairie View Elementary School; Dean was at Ogallala Junior High. Dad was hunting a ghoul just over the border in Colorado. That’s what he was doing – crawling through some old crypt – while Dean constructed his science fair project. My big brother wasn’t the type of kid to content himself with drawing mouse diagrams on construction paper or building pyramids out of sugar cubes; Dean aimed for the moon. His project that year was Dean’s Super Awesome Electromagnet. My brother had a great fondness for things which were super awesome and which began with his own first name; the latter habit culminated with _Dean’s Rag_ , but we’ll get to that shortly.

His first attempt at the Super Awesome Electromagnet wasn’t very super awesome; I don’t recall it working at all. It _did_ come out of an actual book, and not just out of Dean’s head, so that was something. The idea was simple: you rubbed a boring old magnet against a spike nail to magnetize it. After a little bit of effort, you’d be able to pick up a few iron filings. After trying this, you were to wrap a bit of copper wire around the spike and attach the wire ends to the terminals of a dry-cell battery. According to the book, the electricity would strengthen the magnetism and you’d be able to pick up a lot more filings.

Dean had no intention of picking up something as lackluster as a little pile of metal flakes, though; Dean wanted to pick up Volvos, steam engines, possibly passenger aircraft. Dean wanted to flip a switch and move the planet a few feet to the left.

Bam! Awesome!

We each had our part to play in the creation of the Super Awesome Electromagnet. Dean was the engineer. I was the test dummy. Little Sammy Winchester, Ogallala’s answer to Chuck Yeager.

Dean’s new and improved version of the experiment skipped the old dry cell entirely (it was probably flat when we borrowed it from the hardware store, he reasoned) in favor of actual wall-current. Dean found an old lamp in the closet, stripped the cord down to the plug, and wrapped his spike in dense spirals of bare wire. Then, settled on the floor of our West Thorton Street apartment, he offered me the Super Awesome Electromagnet and suggested I do my part and plug it in.

I hesitated – give me a little credit, here – but in the end, Dean’s manic enthusiasm was enough to persuade even the strongest critic. I plugged it in. There were no Volvos flying through the air, but the gadget _did_ blow out every light and appliance in our apartment, every light and appliance in the building, and every light and appliance in the building next door. Something blew in the electrical transformer out front and the police came. Dean and I spent an awful hour watching from our father’s bedroom window, the only one with a view of the street (all the others looked out on the barren, shit-studded yard behind us, where the only living soul was a mangy dog named Ruff-Ruff). When the police left, a power truck pulled up. A man in spiked shoes climbed the pole between the two apartment buildings to examine the transformer. Under any other circumstances, this would have had us enthralled for hours, but not that day. That day we could only wonder if our father would send us away to military school. Eventually, the lights came back on and the power truck rolled away. We didn’t get caught and lived to see another day. Dean decided he’d build a Super Awesome Glider instead of a Super Awesome Electromagnet for his science project. He informed me I would get to take the first ride. Wouldn’t that be great?


	11. Chapter 11

I was born in 1983, but we didn’t have a television until 1990. Dad rented a furnished apartment and, surprise of all surprises, the TV actually worked for once. The first thing I remember watching on it was _Robot Monster_ , a movie in which a man dressed in a monkey-suit, wearing a fish bowl on his head – Ro-Man, he was called – ran around attempting to kill the last survivors of a nuclear war. I felt this was art of the highest nature.

I also watched _Highway Patrol_ with Broderick Crawford as the fearless Dan Matthews, and _One Step Beyond,_ hosted by John Newland, the man with the world’s creepiest eyes. There was _Cheyenne_ and _Sea Hunt, Your Hit Parade_ and _Annie Oakley_ ; there was Tommy Rettig as the first of Lassie’s many friends, Jock Mahoney as _The Range Rider_ , and Andy Devine yowling, “Hey, Wild Bill, wait for me!” in his odd, high voice. There was an endless parade of vicarious adventure packaged in black-and-white, fourteen inches across and sponsored by brand names which still sound like poetry to me. I loved it all.

But TV came relatively late to the Winchester household, often an absent friend after its initial appearance, and I’m glad. I am, when you take a moment to think about it, a member of a rather select group: the last handful of American hunters who learned to research and train before they learned to eat a daily serving of video bullshit. Maybe this isn’t so important. On the other hand, if you’re just starting out as a hunter, you could do worse than strip your television’s power cord, wrap it around a spike, and then plug it back into the wall. See what blows.

Just and idea.


	12. Chapter 12

In mid-2005, my brother and I rescued one Haley Collins and her brothers from a wendigo. We didn’t know it at the time, but she would go on to become a literary agent just like one of my childhood heroes, Mr. Forrest J. Ackerman. Forry (who sometimes referred to himself as the “Ackermonster”) was a compulsive memorabilia collector who changed the lives of thousands of kids – myself included – when he began editing a magazine called _Famous Monsters of Filmland_. Ask anyone associated with the fantasy-horror-science fiction genres during the past thirty years and you’ll get a laugh, a flash of the eyes, and an endless stream of bright memories – I all but guarantee it.

Anyway, back in 2005, before Haley was working on the _Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction_, I scrawled my phone number across a photocopy of her brother’s backcountry permit and gave it to her in case she ever needed us again. I didn’t really think about it after that, but Haley kept it. Just like Forry, she saved _everything_.

About twenty years later, while Dean and I were signing autographs at a Los Angeles Supernatural convention, Haley turned up in line… with the old permit, my long-forgotten college cell number hastily scribbled across the bottom. She wanted me to sign it to her, and I guess I did, although the whole encounter was so surreal I can’t be completely sure. Talk about your ghosts. Man oh man.


	13. Chapter 13

The first monster I killed wasn’t even a monster. It was a ghost. The ghost of one Mr. Alfred Mumphrey, Senior, an old coot who never did much more that scratch at the walls of the abandoned wreck that was once his house. Dean had to break through the coffin lid when my twelve-year-old strength came up lacking, but Dad made him let me salt and burn the bones all on my own. Super awesome! Bam!


	14. Chapter 14

My first real kill – you always know the first one, I think – came near the end of McVeigh’s trial for the Oklahoma City Bombing. I was crouched behind a boulder, in the woods outside Sparta, Missouri, watching my father load another clip of silver bullets into his SIG-Sauer. He had been tracking a werewolf for the better part of two months, and this was the last chance he would have to take it down until the next full moon. I was fourteen at the time, and significantly more frightened that I let on. The wolf my father had injured was trying to crawl away while Dad reloaded, when a second appeared from the darkness and lunged at my father.

I don’t know if Dad had planned it to go down like it did. I wouldn’t exactly put it past him, but I doubt he would have risked himself just to kill two birds with one stone – to see if I could still my trembling hands long enough to get some blood on them, and solve Sparta’s werewolf problem at the same time. Maybe then, in his eyes, I would no longer be little Sammy, failing to live up to my brother’s talent or my father’s zeal, scribbling in my journal until five in the morning or thumbing through tattered pages in the back of one library or another, where the musty smell of rotting books often hung heavy in the stagnant air and the librarians gave out dirty looks whenever an ancient chair squeaked a little too loudly.

My father hated me, I think. Well, not _me_ , per se, but certainly my penchant for favoring research and organization over the thrill of the hunt. In his effort to avenge my mother and turn me into the perfect soldier – to turn me into _Dean_ – he changed from that nutty, doting father who encouraged me with language workbooks to an unapproachable drill sergeant living a largely transient existence. The money he hustled every month covered a roof over our heads but little else. Pastor Jim and Uncle Bobby would sometimes send us boxes of clothes, but mostly, it was Dean who tied up my father’s loose ends.

It was Dean who took the gun from my quivering hands after I killed that second wolf. I still have no idea where my brother came from – Dad had sent him hunting in the opposite direction – but I suspect he started running when he heard our father’s first shots. Dad finished the first wolf off, clapped me on the shoulder, and went about disposing of the bodies while Dean hugged me close, kept me together while I tried to shake apart. The thing about werewolves, the thing that no one cares to remember, is that they’re people, and it’s a human face that stares back at you after you’ve put a neat little bullet hole between its eyes. No, you never forget your first kill.


End file.
